April showers brought a DC superhero smackdown AND zombies, but also made for one rainy season at retail. The NPD Group confirms that the video game industry suffered a 25 percent year-on-year decline in overall retail game sales, a disappointing return to widening monthly slumps after a slighly rosier March reception.

As it turns out, March's bestselling title, BioShock: Infinite, had to give up its throne and ended up in third place on NPD's software top ten for April, topped by Injustice: Gods Among Us and Dead Island: Riptide. Deep Silver's zombie slashing sequel proved to be a top seller in Europe as well, so perhaps unsurprisingly we can still count on zombies to pull through at retail despite the poor overall industry performance.

Microsoft once again led the pack when it came to monthly hardware sales, and certainly were the most forthcoming with actual sales figures; the company managed to sell 130,000 Xbox 360 consoles in April.

Nintendo again chose to highlight their growing software sales, particularly its first party releases for the 3DS which grew 52 percent year-on-year to 2.1 million units. As a result, the console giant is confident that this year will be the best yet for the 3DS platform. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon remained Nintendo's bestselling 3DS title last month at 140,000 units, placing the title's lifetime-to-date sales at 530,000 copies. Nintendo also confirmed that 94,000 copies of LEGO City Undercover sold last month, enough to place it in the tail end of NPD's software top ten.